Command and Conquer: The First Decade was an epic box set of all the Command and Conquer games that were released before Tiberium Wars. It was magnificent for having all those classic games on one disc, however there were issues with it, even after two official patches.

Thus I was shocked when I saw this on C&C.com which revealed that an Unofficial 1.03 Patch has been made by the C&C community.

If you want to play any of those classic games with most of the bugs fixed then it is well worth checking out. Great stuff for the C&C Community to be doing this kind of thing.

So the Chancellor announced yesterday that VAT in the UK was being cut from 17.5% to 15% from the 1st December, of course this has caused uproar in Parliament and it will possibly lead to all of us tax payers shelling out loads more in a few years time to sort the mess out.

There is some good news that has come out of this change in how VAT works, Overclockers.co.uk have announced that as of right now all their products are being sold at the reduced VAT price.

If you are looking to splurge out on a new rig or just a handful of components, well that is a great place to go right now.

Now if only I had enough spare change to be able to fork out for a new graphics card…

The all time classic that is known as Half-Life is now celebrating its 10th Birthday and it is time to celebrate. Ok so it turned 10 properly yesterday, but who cares about that really? What is important to know is that one of the defining games of our generation has been on shelves around the world for 10 years.

It is a game that has had a profound effect on myself, and I am sure on many other people. I remember playing the Uplink demo and falling in love with it, the gameplay so damn good and I was blown away when I got my hands on the full game. Everything from the set-pieces such as the Tentacle Monster to the Dam along with the story and the fighting was brilliant. Not many other games have followed in the footsteps of it which is a great shame.

The impact that the game has had on the modding scene too is amazing, there are so many mods for Half-Life, and so many great ones it is unbelievable. Natural Selection, Team Fortress Classic and Counter-Strike just to mention a few show the great legacy of the GldSrc engine.

In honour of Half-Life’s birthday ModDB have a little feature showing off some of the best amateur mods, and mods that have become full blown games that were based on what we saw with Half-Life. It is well worth a read and can be found here.

If, for some strange reason you haven’t played Half-Life yet, well it is available on Steam for $0.98 until 12:01 pm PST on November 21.

Kudos 2 by Positech Games (aka “Cliffski”) is an interesting life-sim game. I have the demo, yet unfortunately I haven’t had much time to play it, though I am sure that I would really enjoy it.

Regardless, Cliffski has done a nice little Post Mortem on the game, it is well worth a read right here.

While you are at it, don’t forget to check out the demo, or even buy the game from this lovely page.

Good news for all the European fans of World of Goo, 2D Boy have managed to change some things with their Euro publisher, RTL Games. As such the game will be coming to Wii Ware and the PC in both retail and digital formats sometime towards the end of December.

The PC version of the game will cost €19.99 at retail and it will also be coming back onto Steam in Europe.

There is some bad news however, as of right now that mysterious “6th Chapter” will not be included in the European retail release as was originally planned. The boys want to keep all versions of the game the same wherever possible.

When I asked Kyle further about this “6th Chapter” he revealed the following:

It’s possible it will never come out. It’s also possible that it will come out as an expansion for all versions of the game, at the same time, available to all regions. The thing I feel great about, though, is that we can finally say that there is one and only one definitive version of World of Goo, available to everyone.

Check out all the details regarding the Euro release here.

First off the bat, Left 4 Dead is beyond awesome. I have just spent the best part of two hours with three of the guys from the RPS Steam Group playing through the demo levels on the Expert mode. It wasn’t until we finally managed to get to the safe room at the end of the second demo level that I realised how long we had been playing.

I was too busy playing and getting sucked into the game to take many screenshots, but those guys at Rock, Paper, Shotgun have some galleries of the game from their trip to Valve.

This game is just amazing in co-op mode, singleplayer is ok, but it has nothing on blasting through the hordes of zombies with three friends. They seriously are hordes, at times the AI Director will send what seems like thousands of zombies at you and will then throw in some Boss characters like the Boomer or Hunter.

When we were playing it was the Director that we talked about most, this thing is magnificent. It can build the tension so much just by keeping the opening areas of a level relatively clear of zombies. After the onslaught that we battled against so often in the opening rooms of the second demo level, to fail and start again in near total silence in freaky.

I won’t forget the moment when we entered the last but one chambers and heard the sobs of the Witch, we saw he sitting in the doorway blocking our path to the final battle. With three of us on very little health we decided to that the person with the most health would instigate the fight. It was quick and brutal, only two of us were left standing with 1 health a piece, we managed to force the Witch to retreat away from the level.

That was intense, and it was pure awesome. I can’t wait to get back to play this again tonight.

Galactic Civilizations II has reached version 2.0, a free mega-update for the awesome turn-based space strategy game. Continuing with the ethos of Stardock you can only get the update if you register your copy of the game via Stardock’s digital distribution platform, Impulse.

The update applies in large part to the latest expansion, Twilight of the Arnor and it will help link all the expansions together. Some of the major parts of the update area as follows:

* Players can now design new starships from the main game menu
* All game campaigns have been updated to be playable within Twilight of the Arnor
* New user manual
* Numerous new game setup options
* Updated diplomatic options
* New planetary governors for automating the building of planets
* Revamped espionage system
* Auto-building for starbases
* Balance updating
* Improved graphics

More information here.

Those wonderful fellas over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun have gona hands on with Left 4 Dead and, in the process they claim to have killed over 11,000 zombies. That is a lot of zombies. A hell of a lot of zombies.

Each of the four writers have posted their thoughts on their massive play test during their trip to Valve and they make for some very exciting reading.

For those of you who pre-ordered the game, then the demo will be going live sometime tomorow, I can’t frickin wait.

This isn’t going to be an Angry Internet Man rant. I don’t have the energy to just place a few hundred words of anger on this page. Instead I’m going to brainstorm and try to get to the bottom of this, and of course, I’m going to succeed where the corporations can’t or won’t. I’m going to solve the problems of Piracy and DRM. I’ve got a few ideas on the subject, things that will help combat this vicious cycle that’s just perpetuating both sides. Bear with me and I’m sure something insightful will come at the end of it.

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Valve have just revealed that Steam Cloud will be going public later this week with the launch of the Left 4 Dead demo. Steam Cloud is the latest, and maybe one of the best, innovations from Valve, with Steam Cloud any personal settings made in a game using Steam Cloud will be available to the same game on any other PC using the same account. Cloud services will be made available to all publishers and developers using Steam, and the service will be applied to all the Valve games on Steam.

Steam Cloud will make its first appearance with the Left 4 Dead demo which is due for release this Thursday to all those who pre-orderd.

Doug Lombardi had this to say while sitting on a cloud:

For some time now, Steam has allowed gamers to log on from any computer in the world and access their applications. This also makes it easy to upgrade a PC without worrying about losing your games. Steam Cloud is a natural extension of the portability Steam affords gamers and developers, and we intend to expand its feature set as it is used in Left 4 Dead and other games coming to Steam.”